One more name has been added to the number of men
and women who, for their services to the Indian peoples, have been raised to
the position of sainthood. The names of Tulsidas, Ramdas, Mirabai, and Kabir
are venerated by all Indians, and their religious songs sung and pondered over,
not only by the educated men and women, but particularly by the masses also.
The last pearl to be added to the necklace which Mother India wears is Mahatma
Gandhi. Dozens of biographies of him already exist, and hundreds more will be
written immediately. His tragic death has given a profound shock to all peoples
of the world.
Abraham Lincoln, after a fratricidal war had been
brought to an end, and the attempt to divide the United States into two nations
had been thwarted, was planning to bind up the wounds caused by that war and to
lay down a policy of healing and justice. But just as he was entering upon his
new plan of service, he was struck down by the hand of an assassin. In a
similar manner, just as Mahatma Gandhi had planned a campaign of work to bind
the tragic wounds in the invisible body of other India, and to unite once again
the two halves of India–India and Pakistan–at least in spirit, the hand of an
assassin brought to an end his labours.
As a tribute to the work which he did, my aim is to
give only a few ideas concerning his work. Historians in the generations to
come will assess his work at a truer value than anyone can do at the moment.
Gandhiji 1 was in the core of his being
a rebel and a militant, but he was a rebel for Humanity’s sake, one who sought
nothing for himself, but was militant against the evils which surrounded the
peoples of India, and in South Africa against the injustices meted out to them
by South African white legislation. One remarkable attribute of his character
which makes him shine out more than any Indian leader is that during his
lifetime all his work was for the masses of India. Never for a moment were
their hardships of livelihood and difficult conditions of travel and other lack
of amenities forgotten by him. The theme of his life was ‘for the masses’, and
in the light of this aspiration alone must the work that he did be assessed in
all that he succeeded and in all that he failed.
There is little need here to narrate the story of
the work which he did to bring India to national liberation. There is a long
list of noble patriots, from the beginning of the Indian National Congress in
1885, who prepared the way for him, one of the most powerful being Annie
Besant. But it was Gandhiji who made Swaraj or ‘autonomous India’, a
‘self-ruling’ India, not only the hope and dream of the educated classes, but
also of the millions of the so-called uneducated masses. He made the four
hundred millions in India feel as a unity.
As did all great souls, Gandhiji tried to raise all
the millions to his own level of purity in every thought, word and deed, and he
radiated the spirit of Harmlessness. During all his campaigns for the
denunciation of England and its administration, however seemingly violent were
his phrases, there never was a particle of hatred in his heart towards those
whom he denounced. He thought, when he appealed to the millions of India to
join in his political work, that they also would be able to create a revolution
against England with no hatred in their hearts. His creed of ‘non violence’ and
Satyagraha (relying on Truth), as he initiated what practically amounted
to revolution, seemed the ideal of Peace upon earth put into practice in a
world of turmoil and oppression. He succeeded in living this life himself; but
he had to admit profound disappointment at the incidents of violence which were
the result of his own campaign of revolution and reconstruction, which in
theory was to be ‘non violent’. Again and again, after he had started a
campaign for ‘Non cooperation’, as when he called on the people not to pay
taxes, on the legal profession to abstain from working in the English courts,
and on college students to abstain from going to the lectures, and when in
1921, at the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales, he proclaimed in Bombay
a hartal or ‘silent mourning’ with a stoppage of all business, he had to
admit that on many an occasion the result was an outbreak of violence. No
wonder, therefore, that once he wrote:
“A rapier run through my body could hardly have
pained me more. I have said times without number that Satyagraha admits of no
violence, no pillage, no incendiarism; and still in the name of Satyagraha we
burnt down buildings, forcibly captured weapons, extorted money, stopped
trains, cut off telegraph wires, killed innocent people and plundered shops and
private houses. If deeds such as these could save me from the prison house or
the scaffold, I should not like to be so saved.”
Nevertheless, his dream that all, irrespective of
education, culture, caste or class, could be pure in heart as he was himself
was never modified by him. It was his dream, as his life was brought to a
tragic close, that he would succeed in bringing a completely new spirit in
India that would unite Hindu and Muslim and bring an era of “Peace on earth,
and goodwill to men”.
Gandhiji had another great dream, which was that of
all who truly love India. This was to make a caste-less India. Caste has been
modified considerably of late in certain of its old harsh restrictions,
particularly against the ‘Pariahs’ or ‘untouchables’. Nevertheless, many of the
evils of caste distinction still seem as hard and rigid as ever. One
significant phrase, which he coined for the untouchables who had euphoniously
been called ‘Panchamas’, or fifth caste, was to abolish the idea of
untouchability and coin the name ‘Harijan’, that is, ‘the people of God’. No
longer are the words ‘Pariah’ and ‘untouchable’ used by anyone in India, or
even ‘Depressed Classes’. Once he coined a phrase, which has dropped into the
background of Indian consciousness, to the great loss of her spirituality. This
is the word ‘Daridra Narayan’. ‘Narayan’ is one of the most ancient names for
God; and ‘daridra’ is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘poor’, ‘destitute’. ‘Daridra
Narayan’ was used by Gandhiji as a spiritual designation to describe the poor
and helpless, particularly the Harijans. It had the significance, “God the poor
man, God the destitute.”
One of the strangest elements in his character was
his fasting. Fasts are a part of Hindu religion, as a means of purification and
self-recollectedness. But they only last for twenty-four hours. There is in
Islam the very severe fasting, from an hour and half before sunrise to sunset
each day during the month of Ramzan, so severe that not a drop of water must be
drunk. This Muhammadan fast, which is obligatory upon all Muslims, except those
who are old or sick, means a very severe testing when the month falls, as
sometimes it does, in the season of the greatest heat. Gandhiji fasted not so
much to purify himself but as an act of atonement for the sins committed by
others. So great was his influence that naturally his prolonged fasts, bringing
him to the verge of death, brought about the result that, for the time at
least, the evil against which he was agitating ceased.
One noteworthy characteristic in Gandhiji’s inner
life was that he tried all the time to be in communion with God. As he has said
again and again, he never launched any campaign of resistance or began a fast
without long inner meditation and trying to be sure that what he was about to
do was as God would have him do. In old days in England, Cromwell in politics
and in warfare had the same quality of belief that a divine mandate guided him.
One of the greatest charms of Gandhiji was that he was utterly self-revealing,
and in his journals and books he had nothing to hide from public gaze and so
spoke frankly of his hopes, aspirations, mistakes and failures. All the ‘memoirs’
which such a great man might have left to be published after his death,
Gandhiji gave to a vast public which read with eagerness all he had to say.
In a manner that no one ever before had become,
Mahatma Gandhiji was as the Conscience of India. During, his later years,
through voice and pen, he brought into high light one evil after another in the
lives of the Indian people, particularly lately corruption in politics after
India gained Independence, which needed to be clearly recognised if there was to
be any betterment. One of his last actions, as all know, was the denunciation
of the horrible atrocities committed after the separation of India into India
and Pakistan. He succeeded, by his fast in Calcutta after Independence Day, in
forestalling a carefully planned massacre which one group of violent people had
planned against another section of the community.
I wonder if the ultimate future for Mahatma Gandhi
will be what has been the destiny of the teachers before him. That destiny is
to put the teacher on a pedestal, build statues of him, offer him songs and
garlands, and little by little forget how the teacher lived and died that all
might act in accordance with his teaching. In Palestine, where the Jews had a
religious life full of ritual observances, Jesus Christ denounced the evils of
the Jews of his time in the words: “Woe unto you, hypocrites, for ye pay tithes
of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the
law–judgment, mercy and faith; these ought ye to have done.” At the moment
there is intense, almost hysterical, glorification of Mahatma Gandhi, and at
meetings all pledge themselves to commit themselves to his ideals of
harmlessness and service. But India is in the throes of a second birth; party
and caste divisions are acute. True, there is no longer a foreign ruler against
whom to agitate; but among Indians themselves? Will it be a regenerated India
in the spirit of India’s ancient ideals of spirituality and culture? Or an
India after a foreign model with, as in some Western countries, fratricidal
parties and policies, and brother killing brother in the name of Patriotism?
I end this brief tribute with the prayer in the
ceremony for the dead in the Catholic Church: “Rest in the eternal grant unto
him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him!”
1 It is usual in
central and Northern India to add the honorific particle ‘ji’ to a name; hence
Gandhi ji familiarly.